Rainbows Childrens' Hospice

Rainbows Childrens' Hospice was founded by Gail and Harry Moore,
in celebration of their daughter, Laura, who died of Leukaemia in
1989. Rainbows provides respite, palliative and terminal care to
families who have a child with a life limiting illness. Rainbows
Childrens' Hospice needs £3.8m every year to remain
operational so fundraising is an essential activity.

Why did Rainbows choose thankQ?

Rainbows originally used Filemaker Pro to record contact and
donation details, but limited data storage meant that only the most
recent information could be held. Rainbows Children's Hospice
selected thankQ in August 2003.

Rainbows and thankQ overview

Rainbows went live with thankQ in March 2004, with the finance
module added in June 2004. In 2009, Rainbows upgraded to an
enhanced version of thankQ taking advantage of the latest reporting
and deduping tools. Rainbows' original bespoke modules were built
into the upgrade along with some additional developments around
events and sponsorship.

The benefits

Rainbows have made a number of specific modifications to their
system to reflect their business processes, including a development
to help track the progress of grant applications to trusts and to
make notes of specific deadlines and meeting dates. Integrating
this functionality with the Action Manager module allows users to
set actions for fellow users to complete related tasks.

Rainbows upgraded to a new events module in 2009 which was
specifically set up as workflow processes to help guide users
through the recommended sequence of steps. A simple development
also allows Rainbows to record sponsorship income against bookings
and to allow income other than ticket sales, (ie from raffles,
tombolas, auctions etc) to be predicted and recorded against
events.

thankQ's powerful searching functionality; such as the 'yellow
box search' has also reduced the amount of time Rainbows staff
spend trying to find the information they need in the system.

One of the most notable impacts has been the ability to share
information easily between different departments, improving
communication and knowledge at the same time. thankQ's ability to
react quickly to change requests along with its flexible structure,
ensure that the system will continue to meet Rainbows' needs into
the future as the organisation grows and develops.

thankQ in action with Rainbows Hospice for Children and Young
People

Here are some really rewarding ways that Rainbows used
thankQ's reporting featureto earn and learn more from
their donors:

Example 1: turning lapsed donors into regular givers

In 2009 Rainbows decided to send a mailshot to all donors who
had given £500 or more in their lifetime as donors but had
given nothing in the last two years. Using thankQ's reporting
feature Rainbows identified approximately 3000 people who fitted
these criteria and duly sent out the mailing. Rainbows raised
£3,000 as a direct result of the mailshot and were initially
disappointed as they felt that this figure would probably have come
in anyway. However, 12 months later, Rainbows ran another report
through thankQ, looking at the subsequent giving behaviour of those
people included in the initial mailing. To their surprise, they
found that over the 12 months since the initial mailing, this group
of people had donated more than £50,000 - not only were they
no longer lapsed, but they had actually recovered to the giving
levels that they were previously at, and all through intelligent
searching and segmentation of existing data.

Example 2: getting the most out of Gift Aid

Rainbows ran a report listing everyone who had donated more than
£200 but hadn't completed a Gift Aid Declaration. There were
approximately 600 in total. Rainbows made personal contact with the
top 6, phoned the top 15 and wrote to the rest. This exercise,
which involved around half a day's work, enabled Rainbows to claim
several hundred pounds worth of Gift Aid immediately. And of
course, Rainbows can now claim Gift Aid from any more donations
that these valuable donors make.

Example 3: know your audience and plan your approach

Rainbows thought they knew their audience really well. They were
convinced that they had plenty of core support made up of regular
givers. thankQ's reporting feature told them a different story! In
actual fact the majority of Rainbow's income is currently made up
of one-off donations. This quick investigation now means that
Rainbows can focus more of their fundraising and marketing activity
on encouraging one-off donors to become regular givers. We are
looking forward to the effects of this bearing fruit over the next
couple of years.